The Dean of Change : Dr. Gerald Levey’s job keeps him moving at a hyper pace. His daunting task: to see that UCLA medical school stays on top --despite a tight budget.
At a damask-draped table in Michael Ovitz’s extravagant living room, the dean of the UCLA School of Medicine studies his spinach omelet as Hollywood’s most famous talent broker pitches the scholarly physician as his latest discovery.
“You want to know how many UCLA deans I’ve worked with? Three. Three deans and I’ll tell you right now, they keep getting better. Better and better. And Jerry here--he’s like an energy ball! He can do what has to be done! He’s spectacular! Just what UCLA needs! A leader. A spec-tac-ular leader! Ask anyone! No one says ‘No’ for Jerry. Believe it!”
Dr. Gerald Levey--Harvard Fellow, NIH researcher, distinguished professor and medical provost--smoothes his cream-colored napkin across his lap and smiles at his hyperbolic host.
“Why, thank you, Michael. But, really, I’m not. . . .”
“Hey, I’m the best agent you’ll ever have,” cracks Ovitz, a UCLA alum who until becoming president of the Walt Disney Co. in August was probably the best agent anybody anywhere could have.
And Levey, effusive or un-, is extremely grateful to have him.
As the supremely generous and well-connected chairman of the medical school’s star-studded advisory board, Ovitz is more than an advance man for the less flamboyant dean. He is the wizard who can conjure up the money and the magic to do what Levey and Ovitz both want: to make UCLA the premier medical school in the nation. Driving back to his office after another power breakfast with Ovitz, Levey opens the sunroof of his green Lexus and marvels at the weather and his own good fortune.
“Quite amazing, I would have to say.”
Michael Ovitz or the California sun?
“Both, I would have to say.”
*
Gerald Saul Levey, 59, got the call two years ago last fall. He remembers it vividly because, he says, it was “the call I’d been waiting for all my career.”
Levey was senior vice president for medical and scientific affairs at the New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. when UCLA’s Andrea Rich asked him to come west. “We were looking for someone quite extraordinary,” she says, “so extraordinary, in fact, that many people didn’t think we could find all we needed in just one person.”
What UCLA needed was someone to take over the newly merged roles of medical school dean and provost for medical sciences. The job required a physician with scientific expertise, impeccable academic credentials and business acumen.
“What the job required, it turned out, was Jerry Levey,” says Rich, the former UCLA vice chancellor who is now president of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Levey’s career moves, from endocrinology research at the National Institutes of Health to academia to private industry, landed him quickly on the short list of candidates. But what landed him the job were his unflagging optimism and healthy appetite for change.
At UCLA, like so many other academic medical institutions in the ‘90s, change is a constant.
It has been struggling to deliver state-of-the-art medical care in an increasingly cutthroat marketplace. In addition to the state’s lingering economic woes, revenue from government programs is declining, and managed care networks are dictating their own definitions of quality care.
As a result, the top-rated medical center’s $400-million budget has been stretched to finance the university’s strong research and teaching. At the same time, UCLA is being squeezed by HMOs and insurance companies over the medical center’s charges for its highly successful transplant programs and other high-tech care.
Such pressures have forced the medical center to trim $45 million from its operating budget and eliminate 1,000 jobs over the last several years. In such turbulent times, less optimistic physicians are opting for early retirement. Many of those who remain are in a state of high anxiety.
But not Levey.
“I absolutely love it. To me, when you enter a time of change, there are great opportunities. Change can be a challenge, a gift! If there were no challenge, what would have been the point in me coming to UCLA?”
Within months of Levey’s arrival in September 1994, several high-ranking medical administrators left. The departures included the director of the UCLA Medical Center for Health Sciences as well as the chiefs of the Neuropsychiatric Institute and Hospital, which had been plagued by budget and accreditation problems and questions about patient protection in research experiments.
Levey did not apologize for the shake-ups. “We are building a new paradigm of management,” he told reporters. “Internal shifts are to be expected.”
Levey has his critics, of course--among them, those who cannot or will not move at Levey’s hyper pace. “I think’s he’s got a lot to prove,” says one. “He’s very action-oriented, very decisive, very quick. But, in the long run, time will test the quality of the action.”
For Levey supporter and PET scan inventor Dr. Michael Phelps, the new dean is making “the tough choices” necessary to guarantee UCLA’s future.
“Jerry doesn’t set the new pace,” Phelps says. “He fits it.”
*
As a child growing up on “the wrong side” of the Hudson River in Jersey City, N.J., Levey had little to prove. Although he was a casual student who loved athletics, academic success came easily and he graduated from high school two years early.
From the time he was old enough to race his big sister around the block, he loved to run. He ran after school, before school and on weekends. “I just loved to run--on sidewalks, on the street, on grass, gravel, whatever. I just loved to run,” Levey says.
His mother was a homemaker and his father was Jersey City’s corporation counsel. When he died of a heart attack at 52, Levey’s mother went to work to support her family.
A strong swimmer, Levey spent happy summers at the Jersey shore as a lifeguard, rescuing bathers from the undertow and, on at least one occasion, says his sister, Paula Westerman, politely enforcing the beach’s dress code.
“Let’s just say he was young and embarrassed and she was nude. She was also from California,” Westerman reports. “That, I believe, was his first experience with Californians.”
In his senior year at Cornell University, Levey met Barbara Cohen, a witty blond who sat next to him in “a folk-singing class.” It was a case, Levey says, “of assigned seating--and love at first sight.”
In 1957, Cohen and Levey went off to different medical schools, but they married in 1961. Although each would graduate with a medical degree, Dr. Barbara Levey embarked on a slower professional track.
“It was a very mutually supportive time. I was the only woman in my medical school graduating class, but we were of a different generation. It was our choice that I would raise our children through the formative years so I did a lot of public health, while Jerry moved up the ladder at a faster pace.”
Now that their children are grown--John is a businessman in Washington, D.C., and Robin works with autistic children in New York--their mother is back on the fast track.
Several months after Gerald Levey was named provost and dean, Barbara Levey was tapped as UCLA’s assistant vice chancellor for biomedical affairs.
They have been aware of low grumbling among some faculty members about the appearance of nepotism, but both Dr. Leveys say they have scrupulously avoided any professional overlap.
“She was exquisitely well-qualified for post,” Rich says. “I would have recruited her no matter who she was married to.”
*
There is a brilliant young researcher at the door, a former thyroid patient from Pittsburgh on the phone and a crowd of hungry medical students gathering four stairwells away for “Pizza With the Dean.”
Levey picks up the phone and the patient apologizes for interrupting.
“You always get first priority. How are you doing?”
No emergency, it turns out. But Levey gives no hint he is hurried.
Only after hanging up does he buzz his assistant, Lia, on the intercom.
“Who do I have at 11?”
“He’s here now,” says Lia serenely.
“Ah, fine, fine.”
That brilliant researcher, who has thoughts of leaving UCLA, is sent in. Within minutes he is thanking Levey for allowing him to stay.
Before the researcher is out the door, Levey is out of his chair, pulling on his pin-striped suit coat and speed-walking to the nearest stairs. “I hate to keep the students waiting. They’re on such a tight schedule but it’s important to stay in touch. They need to be heard, they have their concerns. . . .”
The future doctors are dissecting the contents of the pizza boxes as Levey bursts in.
“Why would anybody order a pizza without cheese?” asks one student.
“That’s me!” volunteers Levey, who has followed a mostly vegetarian, fat-free regimen for years.
He entertains the students with a pep talk about how they will be “the vanguard of physicians this country needs to lead us into the 21st century.”
“He’s great, isn’t he?” whispers one young man as the students rush off to their next class. “But he can have his pizza. . . .”
*
Students--as energetic and enthusiastic as the dean--are easy. UCLA’s old guard is a tougher audience.
At a gathering of faculty representatives to weigh Levey’s can-do ideas for departmental consolidation, the air is charged with tension.
The proposed streamlining, it seems, is not the way things usually are done in academia. Some of the professors are balking.
Levey stands firm.
“Look. Times have changed. We’re not as wealthy as we used to be. The old ways won’t work anymore. The question I have to ask and the question you have to ask is, ‘What is best for UCLA?’
“Will there be naysayers? Certainly, there will. But they will have to go along. We can’t get bogged down. We have to move ahead. We can’t sit back and wait for a show of hands and the appointment of all manner of committees. We’re moving ahead. And we’re doing it together!”
Many of the professors, clearly accustomed to a more deliberate pace, are still in their swivel chairs as Levey stands up and heads for the door.
He turns and flashes his best Hollywood grin.
“Terrific. This has been really great! Spec-tac-ular!”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Dr. Gerald S. Levey
Age: 59.
Background: Born in Jersey City, N.J.; now lives in Westwood.
Family: Married to physician and pharmacologist Barbara Levey. Two children--John, 33, and Robin, 30.
Passions: Opera, especially “La Boheme”; sports, especially the New York Rangers; and horror stories, especially Stephen King’s.
On California’s beautiful beaches: “I haven’t been to the beach yet. The last 18 months have been awfully busy. . . .”
